


how to tell if you're in love with your best friend

by ectogeo



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, Feelings Jams, M/M, Meteorstuck, Post-Retcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 09:49:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9317552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ectogeo/pseuds/ectogeo
Summary: Teens trapped on a meteor talk extensively about their Feelings. Rose POV.





	

I was lying on the roof of the ectobiology lab, looking for the silhouettes of horrorterrors against the background of the furthest ring, the subtle places where their completely unlit forms blocked out the total absence of light. There were no stars in view, and no dream bubbles nearby so the darkness was as piercingly clear as it would ever get.

Whenever I thought I saw one swimming through the void I would briefly close my eyes to check that I didn’t see the same eldritch shape on the inside of my eyelid, a figment from my own mind. It took a long time for my eyes to adjust to the dark and for my brain to stop falsifying its own signals. 

The door leading back into the meteor opened suddenly, blinding me with the light from the stairwell.

I groaned, and blinked to see who had joined me. “Hello, brother dearest. What brings you here?”

He plopped himself down beside me, a bold move for someone who had just destroyed my patiently crafted nightvision, and shrugged, “Kanaya said this is where you’d be.”

“Why? Is she looking for me?”

Dave raised an eyebrow. “No, why would she send me if she wanted to talk to you?”

I shrugged. 

“So what, are you up here both hiding from her and waiting for her to find you?” 

Well, when he put it that way, I realized that was exactly what I was doing. But I still didn’t say anything, unwilling to concede that he saw right through me.

“Well, I came to talk to you about some of my stuff, but your stuff seems way more interesting, aka why aren’t you asking out the girl of your dreams at this very moment?”

I stopped holding my breath and laughed, “Oh Dave, if only it were that simple. Anyway, you have to go first. You’re the one who went out of your way to find me, so something’s eating you up. Spill it.”

“Ugh, fine. It’s about Karkat.” At last an opportunity for revenge. This was bound to be a rollercoaster of embarrassment for him.

“Do go on,” I said with as much of a malevolent twinkle in my eye as I could muster.

 

“I’m worried that Karkat is starting to like me. Because sometimes he gets really quiet and just looks at me longer than usual. Like he’s trying to figure me out or something. Like he’s trying to read my mind just by looking at my face.”

“You should take off your shades once in awhile so he can see your eyes.” I reach toward his face to steal them, but he swats my hand away.

 

“What? No fucking way, I have a brand to maintain. It’s not easy to come across as an aloof douchebag at all times.” He resettles the aviators further up on the bridge of his nose. It is an absurdly dorky gesture and I snicker. “Anyway, do you think I might’ve been flirting with him too hard? I’m used to like… casually flirting with like, you and John, both of whom are completely immune to attraction to boys--”

“Ha! Accurate.”

“--so with y’all I always knew it was safe and no feelings would happen for any of us. But I guess flirting is just how I interact with friends? I always just joke around and compliment and tease my friends, but maybe sometimes this gets interpreted as me being into them? And I don’t know how to fix that? I don’t want to mislead him, Rose. My instinct right now is to avoid him for awhile so that he understands that I’m not into him, but how do I guarantee that THAT doesn’t hurt him either? Or is it worth it to save him from the pain of rejection later? I also know it would be painful for me not to talk to him, just thinking about that I already know I would miss hanging out with him as a friend.” 

He took a deep breath and continued. “How do I navigate this? Like, I’ve never even liked a guy, so how do I know if this is the real deal or if I’m just lonely and desperate for affection now but would be unable to keep up an actual relationship? How the fuck am I supposed to figure out how not to break anyone’s heart? Like, right now it might be fine, I’m just starting to get vibes, so clearly he hasn’t made up his mind yet either. Should I just... assume I am what I’ve always said I am and pull a John ‘I am not a homosexual’ Egbert on him?

“Then again I’m not anything like the image I had of myself for most of my life. Or rather who I was trying to be. I guess I’m afraid of what people will think of me if I’m suddenly different than who they thought I was for years. I’m like… so worried about this possibility of seeming fake or deceptive or something, that it’s hard for me to even focus on what are my actual feelings. I get stuck like ten inception levels down in the what ifs. Instead of asking myself ‘could I possibly have a crush on this hot shouty alien?’ I have to first think about ‘if I do like this guy, how would John and Jade and, I guess, my alt-universe bro, now perceive me?’ It’s such bullshit, Rose, I don’t know how to function.”

His rant finally seemed over, but I paused for a few seconds to process everything he’d just said, and give him a chance to start back up again in case he thought of something else. I wasn’t necessarily shocked. After all I’d been telling him he wasn’t straight for years and I’d seen how Karkat looked at him sometimes and I’d seen how flustered Dave could get when he noticed and I’d seen how inseparable they’ve been lately... but I was really surprised and honestly kind of moved that he had come to me to talk about it. Dave doesn’t open up very easily. He has a brand to maintain. 

Anyway, he trusted me and I needed to help him through this, I could postpone any jokey thoughts of petty vengeance for another day.

“First of all Dave, don’t fucking avoid him. That is the worst thing I’ve ever heard, and guaranteed to cause max sadness for both of you. You don’t need to like… make a decision of what to do about this anytime soon either, we have two fucking years left stuck here, time is not an issue. Just keep being his friend for now.”

“Okay, but you are taking your sweet time about talking to Kanaya and let me tell you that doesn’t seem so good to me,” he blurted out, and it felt like a punch to the gut. “Y’all are fucking pining for each other and I know that Terezi, Karkat, and I can’t stand it lmao. It’s such a non-secret that y’all like each other, why won’t one of you just pull the fucking trigger?”

I blushed angrily, and suddenly reconsidered my magnanimous forgiveness for momentarily hurting my eyes like 5 whole minutes ago. “Like I said it’s really not that simple.”

“No, you’re avoiding her just as much as I’m avoiding him, but with waaaay less reason, since it’s super obvious how mutual it is with--”

“I just don’t want to disappoint her,” I cut in. “She’ll say yes but the Rose Lalonde she likes is way more perfect than I am.”

“The fuck??”

“She just… has a version of me in her head that I don’t think is completely accurate, she puts me on this pedestal of incredible grace and intelligence, but I definitely don’t want to burst her bubble because… it just feels nice to be looked at like that? Like I’m the cleverest most badass girl who has ever existed? When I’m really actually just a mess?” I melted and sagged down to the ground until I was lying on my back, too distressed to even be properly dramatic about my collapse.

“You’re not that big a mess, Rose.” 

“I just... need to find a way to ease into it. I just need to loosen up around her, I think. And I need to figure out how to demystify myself in her eyes. She’s been into me in like a crush on an internet celebrity way for literally YEARS, Dave. As a kid she wrote like THEORIES about me, as the author of the SBURB walkthrough. How fucked up is that? Worst of all, she won’t even show them to me, she’s too embarrassed. So it’s just really weird.” 

“Holy shit. I need to see what young Kanaya theorized about you.” 

“I KNOW, ME TOO.” I tried my best to remove my face from my skull by pressing my palms into my cheeks then pulling them downward.

“Like that is just sure to be a goldmine. Plenty of embarrassing material that I will one day tell my half-alien-vampire half-generic-goth-girl nieces and nephews.”

“Pfff hahaha, I think you’re thinking way too far ahead there.” I paused trying to peel off my face in embarrassment and pushed myself back up to a seated position. “Let me at least ask her out first before you get too excited about becoming an uncle.”

He grinned. “So you’re gonna ask her out!”

“Yeah yeah.” I rolled my eyes and tried to look annoyed but I was smiling too.

“Okay then message her now, if you’re not too chicken.”

I inhaled deeply and pulled out my phone, and Dave looked over my shoulder to make sure I stayed on track. _Would you meet me in the common area for dinner together tomorrow at 6pm? I’d really like to talk to you about something in person._

I let out the breath, closed my eyes for added drama, and hit send.

We both watched the animated ellipsis dance until she sent back a brief (intrigued? excited? baffled? whatever) confirmation. 

“God, where the fuck were we?” I laughed, a weight off my shoulders for the moment. I didn’t have to worry about what to say to Kanaya until like... tomorrow. “You were mid-breakdown and then we got distracted by my own romantic ineptitudes.”

“Fuck, I was hoping you’d forgotten about all that.”

“Nope, I didn’t get to psychoanalyze you to within an inch of your life yet. Let the torture continue, my brother.” I pulled out my psychology gear from my sylladex: a moleskin notebook and pretentious fountain pen, some decorative reading glasses purely for resting on the tip of my nose and looking condescendingly over the rims of, a pad of prescription forms, and a stack of informational pamphlets (written by Dave and illustrated by Terezi) explaining the side-effects of various psychiatric drugs.

“All right so… now that we’ve each had a chance to completely fall apart due to the human emotion known as teen drama, I’ll maybe try to be more coherent. I guess… first of all… how am I supposed to tell the difference between friendcrushes and romantic ones?” 

I raised my eyebrows as high as they would go, and tilted my chin down to peer as hard as I could over my prop glasses. “Please define ‘friendcrush’ for the record,” I said in my most professional voice. I was teasing him but I really was fascinated by this.

“You know, like,” he faltered. “Like, when you first meet someone new and you really click and you want to spend all your time talking to them and you make it your mission to always try to make them happy and you want to know what their hugs feel like. And after awhile it goes down to normal levels of platonic friend feelings, but in those first few months it’s just so vivid and desperate that I can only think to describe it as a crush.”

I glanced up from the notes I was taking. “We’ve been on the meteor for like two years now, not a few months.” 

“Yeah, I know, a few months was just an average I pulled out of my ass.”

“Okay, none of this generality bullshit,” I grinned. “Shit’s getting real now.” I clicked a pen for effect. “Tell me about all your past and present friendcrushes and which ones specifically are troubling you right now.”

“Rose, have I ever mentioned that you’re the worst sister I ever had?” I gave him a sinister smile. 

“Okay, well, I definitely have had friendcrushes on all y’all. You, Jade, John, Terezi, even Kanaya, and those all faded like I said into like regular platonic affection. But like I just can’t get over Karkat. I highkey want to be his best friend. I’ll still stay up until 3am and not even notice how late it is because we were chatting on pesterchum. I never get sick of spending time with him. I am like nosy as hell about his troll friends because I want to make sure they aren’t my competition in the quest for Karkat’s best friendship. Just like think about this for a goddamn second, Rose, his Alternian friends are like mostly dead and I still get jealous of them. I need more than anything not to lose him as a friend, so I really don’t want to fuck this up and let him fall for me when I can’t return his feelings.”

“Okay but, what if you can return his feelings? Hold on, don’t sigh at me, I know you have always thought I was joking when I said you were gay, but like honestly some of the stuff you’ve said--throughout your life and also just now--has actually struck me as a genuine interest in dating dudes.”

“Ugh, Rose, I really don’t know about that,” he said sharply. Then, softer, “Can I ask, like, how did you figure out you were into chicks? Did you just passively realize it one day or did you have to like actively interrogate your own feelings? By the way I still vividly remember the day you came out to me because you sent me a photoshopped image you made of the lead singers of Evanescence and Nightwish making out, and their heads were also blended seamlessly onto octopi whose tentacles were wrapped around each other. The image was titled help_dave_im_gay.txt.jpg.pdf and that was the day I knew your prowess for irony would one day surpass mine.”

“Pffff, thank you but I’m 1000% convinced that neither you nor your Bro have any idea what the literary concept of irony actually means.” I was laughing so hard I could barely breathe, I remembered that day too and it was still so funny.

“It was a masterpiece, since like all good ironic works, it was created to express a great truth,” he said in stops and starts but completely deadpan, clearly trying to maintain composure, but then immediately cracked up, unable to contain himself upon seeing me losing my shit. 

“Well I’m just glad I could harness your aesthetic so well. It seemed important at the time to be simultaneously jokey and dead serious.”

“Yeah, it was the perfect way to tell me to be honest.” 

His grin faded and he looked suddenly distracted. “Karkat gets so mad sometimes, when I do stuff ironically. He sees it as downplaying my own talents and accomplishments by drowning them in a sea of certified crap. Or sometimes he thinks when I claim something as ironic I’m distancing myself from my own opinions so that I judge people’s reactions first before fully committing to things. That drives him up the wall. I’m starting to see his point and it makes me cringe at what an awful shit I used to be.” He paused again, then laughed. “God, I guess I’m even starting to sound like him, dragging my past selves. Next thing you know I’ll be in a self-loathing rap battle with past and future Daves on a memo board or something.”

I snorted, “Oh my fucking god, just one of you muttering raps to yourself under your breath is more than enough.”

“Rose. Rose do you not appreciate my ill beatz, with a z?”

“I might like them better if I could discern any of the words you were actually saying, but you literally just wander around mumbling indistinguishably to yourself and then when anyone is like _question mark noise_ you act so persecuted and misunderstood, it’s hilarious.”

“Haha, fair enough.”

“Okay so back to how I figured out I liked girls…”

“Oh right, yeah, please tell me. What is like the easy 10 step program for finding out whether or not you’re gay?”

“All right, as your licensed psychologist, I’m writing you a prescription for something you need to do once a day for a week: Close your eyes and really think about Karkat’s junk.” 

I scribbled quickly on one of the fake prescription forms I keep handy for jokes at all times, and handed it over to him. I hadn’t filled out any of the information, and instead had simply doodled a crude cartoon of myself waggling my eyebrows.

“This is fucking incredible,” he snorted. “But also I’m suing for malpractice. I don’t have any idea what troll dick looks like.”

“So read porn like a normal person.”

“Oh my god,” it suddenly dawned on him. “You have been reading all those bodice rippers from Karkat’s stash. You must be an expert in troll anatomy.”

I nodded. “I’m an expert in troll anatomy in _literature_ anyway. I’m not convinced these novels weren’t written by Alternian teens, prior to their conscription into the Condesce’s off-world army. So… their grasp of how post-pubescent troll bodies work is probably on equal ground with what I learned about human anatomy from all that wizardfic by anonymous teen authors on the internet I read in my childhood.”

“Hahaha.”

“Also,” I grinned sinisterly, “it’s been a book _exchange_ so he’s been reading my trashy earth romance novels, too.”

Dave blushed and then tried to joke to distract me from his obvious shyness about this topic. “So you’re saying he already has a pretty good idea what my earth human dick looks like, meanwhile I have just no idea what his junk looks like. All this time I’ve been too polite to ask but now the truth comes out that it would have been a perfectly fair question. How could you not tell me this, Rose? You wound me.”

“Dave, you draw dicks everywhere, he didn’t even need to read a book about it lmao.”

“Still.”

“Seriously, though, I legitimately don’t know how you’re going to figure out if you like guys if you don’t make an effort to think about like being in a romantic or sexual situation with them. For me, I needed the sultry jams of emo goth girls to awaken that first feeling in me of yes this is who I want to kiss. After that it took a year of reading and writing wizard erotica to really come to terms with the extent of my queerness. 

“So if you don’t want to just wait around for that sudden but random eureka moment to happen, and you don’t have the time to fully explore your sexual desires through the magnificent outlet of wizardfic, you need to like either picture yourself dating Karkat or if that’s too uncomfortable maybe like whichever male celeb you think is the hottest… Ben Stiller??” He recoiled instinctively at that, so I sagely nodded, “Yep, Ben Stiller is definitely your ideal man. So try to have a sex dream about Ben Stiller.”

Dave was still sputtering in protest, so I went on, “...But then again he might not be your type, so then you’d have to try it again but picture another movie star. However, fantasies about celebrities are only going to get you so far. Because like… you are mostly trying to figure it out in relation to Karkat, even though ultimately this is a big question about yourself that you are trying to answer. At some point you just gotta imagine dating your friend, that is the only way to see if it feels right.”

He didn’t say anything but nodded, and looked away from me, toward the nothingness we were hurtling through. He seemed quite uncomfortable at the idea and I didn’t blame him. It is always uncomfortable to ruminate on things when one of the possible consequences is shattering your own self-image, and the pain of knowing you’ve been wrong about yourself for years.

“Hey. Dave.” I scooched until I was at his side, and put my hand on his shoulder. “Your path’s gonna be different than mine. But you gotta trust yourself. No one else can answer this for you.”

He leaned towards me so I wrapped him in a hug, and politely pretended not to notice how wet his cheeks were.

“Oh, also, if imagining doesn’t work, you could just… try dating him and see if it works out or if you just aren’t into him that way. Or maybe you’ll fall into one of the non-sexual quadrants with him and your sexuality won’t even be an issue.”

He buried his face in his hands. “Oh God, thanks for reminding me, I don’t even think I can deal with the quadrant stuff at all. I don’t like the idea of... not being someone’s only boyfriend, you know? Maybe it’s not always like that though, I haven’t really made an effort to learn about quadrants since I never expected…” He trailed off. “Maybe I’ll watch some of his troll romcoms. Those are bound to explain quadrant stuff.”

“And if you’re lucky maybe also the basics of troll genitalia.” I waggled my eyebrows. 

“Yeppp, never mind that plan, I would probably die of shame. He would know I was thinking about his alien dick or whatever he’s got down there.”

I wanted to get him to act immediately, like I had done with Kanaya, spurred on by Dave’s call to action and his refusal to let me bullshit my way out of it, so I pushed it a bit. “Come on, it’s perfect plan, you have to do it! You should text him right now and invite yourself to his next movie night!” 

He nervously shook his head and flailed his arms like he was trying to wave away a swarm of mosquitos. “No, not yet, I just… Let me just think Rose.” He shrugged. He looked more stressed now, and I felt bad for taking it too far. 

“Aww, okay. Let’s drop it for now. You don’t have to ask him if you can watch movies with him now, but I do still recommend it at some point.” He certainly has a lot to think about for now anyway.

“By the way, Dave, you know that I’ll still love you even if I’ve been dead wrong all these years and you do turn out to actually be straight.” 

“Haha, I know, Rose. I… love you too sis.” He laughed and hugged me again, clinging tight, and I held him until his breathing calmed back down to something like normal, and then he headed back down into the meteor.


End file.
